PACE in National Journal: Time for Wisdom to Prevail
Senate Utility MACT Repeal Measure Fails
June 21, 2012Power Bills to Rise?
July 11, 2012This week, the National Journal asked its group of energy and environment experts whether the EPA should defend, delay, or abolish its current suite of new Clean Air rules. As a response, PACE Executive Director Lance Brown offered the following piece. [View the response online here]
EPA’s clean-air rules will have a widespread detrimental impact on all sectors of the economy, especially energy costs, energy jobs, and the reliability of the power grid. Because these regulations are guaranteed to affect many aspects of the domestic energy industry, including power plants and other targeted sources of “hazardous air pollutants,” it is necessary and urgent that lawmakers work to delay or stop their implementation.
The not-so-comic irony of many of EPA’s clean-air rules is that not only are they damaging to American industry and consumers, but they also ignore empirical data that call the policies into question. The most egregious of these cases is the Utility MACT rule, which yesterday withstood a disapproval resolution in the U.S. Senate. Although EPA has advertised Utility MACT as a mercury rule, 99.98 percent of the benefits calculated by the agency are not a result of mercury reductions. In fact, almost all of the $90 billion in benefits estimated by EPA by 2016 are generated by reductions in particulate matter already governed by agency rules. So while proponents of the rule celebrate what they consider a victory against mercury, their victory dance is pyrrhic at best. At worst, it is a dance on the future graves of thousands of American workers.
